The present invention relates to a method for processing a short message in a telecommunications network.
Short message services for transmitting short messages are already known. The short message services serve to send a short message to a subscriber of a telecommunications network without requiring that a telecommunications connection to the subscriber be made beforehand. This is of particular interest in mobile radio systems, since subscribers in such systems are often unreachable. Incoming short messages are stored in memory by a network operator of the telecommunications network and forwarded to the intended subscriber at a later time. The subscriber is informed of the arrival of a short message intended for him so that he can download the short message from the network operator.
One example of a short message service is the Short Message Service (SMS) using the GSM Standard (Global System for Mobile Communications). This short message service predetermines a transmission frame for transmitting a short message of up to 160 7-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text characters.
Transmitting longer texts is possible with the aid of chained short messages. With the aid of this short message service, it is possible to produce and read the short messages even using simple mobile radio terminals. Since by the GSM Standard provision is made only for text transmission for the short messages, if binary data, such as audio data, image data or the like, are to be transmitted, they would have to be converted into the text format and converted back again into the binary format after being received.